


Never Gonna Die

by theLiterator



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU, Justice League: War
Genre: Disasters, Established Relationship, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Outer Space, Survival, Watchtower - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-24 07:33:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10737057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: One last inspection before they start using the Watchtower as their primary base of operations goes terribly wrong fo Shazam, Superman, Batman, and the Green Lantern.





	Never Gonna Die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BiffElderberry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiffElderberry/gifts).



> I really love Justice League: War, Batlantern, and Billy Batson, so this was a pleasure to write for you. I hope you enjoy this!

“I don’t care what you say, Clark,” Hal snapped, “The ring’s showing his life-signs, and I’m going after him.”

“Hal,” Clark replied, gentle-gentle like he’d always been when talking to Billy at first. “You know what _he’d_ say--”

“He’d call me a damned idiot and he’d probably knock me out to keep me from going, but I’m not like that. _We don’t leave men behind_.”

“Wha’s going on?” Billy asked, fighting to open his eyes. “Did I get hit by lightning?” That was the usual m.o., but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense in context. “Aren’t we in space?”

“Who the hell are you?” Hal demanded, and Billy frowned.

“No one,” he grunted, struggling to get control of his limbs so he could rub away his headache.

“Who the hell is that?” Hal asked again, sounding on the edge of hysteria. Billy thought maybe he should breathe into a paper bag. Batman probably had one for him to use.

“I thought you were in the middle of going off half-cocked on a suicide mission,” Clark snapped irritably.

“That was before there was a _toddler_ on comms,” Hal replied.

“What?” Billy finally pried open his eyes, only to realize that he was alone in what looked like an abandoned warehouse. “Clark?” he asked, hating that his voice broke on the syllable, because he wasn’t a _toddler_.

He was supposed to be with Victor, actually, and that didn’t make any sense. He’d said something about the best tvs in existence and they’d snuck off while Batman and Clark had been having one of their ‘discussions’ and then…

“Cyborg? Clark, I can’t see Cyborg. Clark?”

“We’re working on it, Billy,” Clark said, and Billy had to take him at his word, because he could already tell that Shazam wasn’t going to be coming back anytime soon.

He struggled to sit up, but something on his chest held him completely immobile and he mumbled a protest as the blackness took him again.

***

“Damned _stubborn_ asshole,” Hal said, using the ring to just grab all the atmo in the airlock before it opened and holding it around himself in a bubble. It was a bigger amorphous will ball than he usually went for, but he’d only been able to find the one intact oxygen canister, so the bigger the better, he thought.

The life-sign he’d been tracking flickered, faint and fading, and Hal bit back another curse when the boy on the comms passed out again. (And how the hell had some kid whose voice hadn’t quite settled gotten on the Watchtower in the first place?)

The life-sign went dark, and he muttered, “Fucking hell, Bruce, if you die on me while I’m trying to heroically save your worthless ass, I’m going to make you regret it.”

The orbital vicinity of the Watchtower was a wreck of debris. Scraps of metal, some of it charred and twisted, some of it as pristine as the day it had been machined, floated around him, all of them making up their own orbits around the Watchtower. He could see where some of the larger chunks had escaped the local gravity of the space station itself and were whirling around Earth at the same speed they were, glinting brightly in the unfiltered sunlight.

It had been one of those chunks that had been showing Bruce’s faint life-signs, and Hal headed for it, keeping the movement of his bubble as smooth and steady as possible, since they still had no idea what had happened; didn’t know whether the Watchtower had had some engineering flaw or if it had been sabotage, and what other dangers might still lurk nearby.

“Lucky this didn’t happen next week, after we’d started bringing up staff,” Hal remarked on the open comms. He wasn’t sure if they had the range for this, or if the large chunks of metal might interfere with the signal, but it felt a little better than cruising silently through space on what _felt_ like a routine SAR mission but happened to be the retrieval of Bruce Motherfucking Wayne, aka the only idiot in their band of idiots who didn’t have a way to survive in space on his own.

“Yeah,” Superman replied. “Lucky.” He sounded as skeptical as Hal felt, and Hal snorted.

“You never said who the kid was,” Hal said after a few moments.

He needed to match velocities with the chunk of debris, carefully line them up and match velocities, and then get it inside his will bubble without losing the air or losing his lunch from the disorienting sight of the massive Earth spinning end over end relative to the chunk of debris.

“He goes to Cyborg’s high school,” Superman said slowly.

“Cyborg graduated the year we met him,” Hal pointed out. “There’s no way this kid knew him in school. He can’t be older than 16.”

Superman sighed. “It’s… kind of complicated. Look, just-- don’t tell Bruce. I know you’re not as stupid as you play at, so I know you’ve already guessed. But let me handle Bruce on this one.”

“Yeah, ‘cause you’re so good at--” Hal interrupted himself with a grunt as he caught at the side of the debris without consciously realizing he had even found a good spot to grab, and he shut his eyes because suddenly he was moving a lot more erratically and he could ‘feel’ the flipping sensation and vertigo that came from trying to orient himself to Earth. “-- handling Bruce.”

“You okay out there?” Superman asked.

“Eh, you know how it is, just like threading a needle at 2 miles per second while God laughs at you.”

Superman was quiet for a second, and then he ventured; “So a normal day at the office?”

“Exactly,” Hal said.

“Well, just remember, if you throw up this time, Bruce will _definitely_ find out.”

Someone who wasn’t either of them laughed, and Superman switched gears immediately. “Billy? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Just a scratch; you know how it is. I found Cyborg though.”

“Good,” Superman replied. “Stay with him.”

“Trust me, it would be really, really hard to leave him. You know he weighs more than a small car, right?”

“I’ll tell him to go on a diet next time I see him,” Hal said. He was trying to figure out where Bruce actually _was_ in the debris, and failing utterly because he had his eyes shut tightly against space-sickness. Which, for the record, most species were prone to: being able to orient oneself spatially came with certain downsides when it came to null-G.

 _You’re not going to throw up,_ Hal ordered himself, and then he opened his eyes.

The earth spun nauseatingly around him, and then he slammed on the brakes and promptly slammed his forehead against solid metal as all relative motion _stopped_ at his willing. He saw stars, but couldn’t worry about that yet, blinking until his vision cleared again.

“Physics are a bitch and a half,” he snarled, and then he started crawling hand over hand on the ‘vertical’ face of the debris chunk to see if he could get to Bruce.

 _You’re not going to pass out_ , he informed himself sternly. _Giving yourself a concussion is just a normal day for you. Passing out over a little head bump is a fucking stupid way to die messy in space. Sinestro might even laugh about it, and then where would you be? The butt of every Green Lantern Corps joke for the next several million years. Don’t_ fucking _pass out, Jordan._

***

“Oh good,” Lantern said, breaking into the storage closet that Bruce had managed to duck into when he’d heard the explosion. “You’re still alive.”

Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he went limp.

Null-G meant he was just floating there in the doorway, the pure black backdrop of space behind him showing Bruce exactly how hopeless their situation was, and he hauled the man in with him and managed to get the door closed.

There had suddenly been a lot more air around about a minute ago, and that situation hadn’t changed. Bruce figured Lantern wasn’t completely out for the count, for now, since his ring was still working. Or perhaps it was some sort of fail-safe? Even Lantern didn’t know all the vagaries of the ring’s function, and it was hardly the time to worry about things he had no control of right then.

Bruce wasted no time in pulling the pack from Hal’s unresisting torso and stared at it in disbelief.

“Of all the harebrained plans you’ve half-assed in your life, you had to add _this one_ to the mix?” he demanded of the unresponsive _flyboy_.

There was only one oxygen tank. Only one mask. Only _one_.

“I can’t believe the U.S. Government trusts you to fly multi-million dollar aircraft,” he whispered. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but grim reality was settling in on him, and he carefully pulled Hal in close to him, making sure he could share the oxygen if the air started leaking again.

Hal’s face was bruised pretty badly, and Bruce examined him by touch and the green glow of the ring’s power, and when his fingers found no obvious fracture, he slipped Hal’s comm out and into his own ear.

***

“I’m telling you, I remember lightning,” Billy insisted, and he could hear Clark’s disinterested ‘hmm’. He wished like burning that Cyborg would wake up and confirm his theory.

But his theory was that whatever had hit the Watchtower had used an EM pulse to compound the damage, so…

Cyborg was unconscious. Or offline. Billy knew it was some combination of the two, but Victor sometimes doubted, and-- “He’d be able to wake up, otherwise. You _know_ his powers.”

“He’s still only human,” Clark replied. “I’m having some trouble getting to you. The compartment between us is still leaking air, and I can’t open the door until I figure it out. Sit tight.”

“There should be an emergency sealant above the hatch,” Batman’s rough voice came through the comms. “Push the button, go back to the other room, count of thirty.”

After a moment, he added, “You could stay in the compartment, but it would coat you in plastic sealant. You’d probably survive.”

Clark snorted. “Good to hear your voice, Batman,” he said.

“What the hell were you thinking, sending in Jordan?”

“You know how he is, Bruce--”

“He could have died.”

“It’s _Hal,_ ” Billy interjected, rolling his eyes even though no one could see him. “You’d probably have to stick him in a black hole in order to keep him from coming after you, Bats.”

“Who is that?” Batman demanded. Then, a heartbeat. “Shazam?” There was a note of incredulity in his voice, and then a soft huff sounded between them, the weird, satisfied-Bat noise he always made when he figured something out.

New Robin had pointed out that it sounded way more dignified than an ‘aha!’ but New Robin was also like, five or something, so.

Instead of confirming his secret identity, Billy replied, "Cyborg's unconscious." Three years had been a good run, and besides, even without the League he still had Shazam, and the whole “Protector of Magic” gig wasn’t exactly a bad fallback choice.

And Victor had promised, three years ago, that he’d always be his friend, so that was pretty cool too.

He was pretty sure being the first superhero ever to be kicked out of the Justice League might be interesting too, so… Bright sides.

“And you’re not.” Bruce said, making that noise again. “What do you remember.”

“Lightning,” Billy said immediately, before Superman could dispute it. “There was a huge flash of electricity, and then there were some explosions and stuff. Like a movie set, but not as well-timed, like… I dunno. I feel like--”

He couldn’t muster the Wisdom of Solomon without being Shazamed, and he had only barely scraped through in algebra last year, thanks partly to Eugene sitting with him every night and working through every homework assignment with him.

Podcasts were way easier than … this.

“They weren’t at the same time,” Billy concluded, feeling really, really stupid. “I think that’s important,” he added lamely.

He missed Francesca.

Superman burst through the door then, and Billy could hear through the comms that Batman was talking to Hal under his breath, and then Superman picked Cyborg up and Billy passed out again.

***

Someone was holding Victor’s hand.

“He’s going to be fine, Billy,” he heard, and he was confused for long, slow seconds because he didn’t instantly know who that voice belonged to, didn’t have a snapshot image of the person’s entire digital life before the second syllable finished, and he didn’t like that.

He groaned, and the hand curled in his squeezed hard and tight and Victor squeezed back, which made his entire arm feel like it was on fire.

“Hey, Victor,” someone else whispered, quiet and concerned and oddly… small. “You awake or just having an involuntary muscle spasm because you’re still feeling the aftereffects of that EM pulse?”

“I don’t think we should jump to conclusions, Billy.”

 

“I think we should,” and yeah, that _was_ Billy. He sounded pissed, and Victor squeezed his hand again. He went on the defensive easy, but he usually didn’t let it go to blows; well, unless someone brought up the Vasquezes.

Billy stopped abruptly, his whole body a tangible tension pressed up close to Victor’s side.

“Look at the facts, Clark: something took out both me and Cyborg while we were in the monitor room; we can't get power to key systems so we don't die; and _I remember lightning_.”

“I’ve seen you change, Billy, remember? There’s always lightning; it could have been anything causing you to…”

 

“Un-Shazam?” Billy suggested. “No way. I’ve been doing this for 3 years now, and Shazam is pretty much invincible except when he gets all overloaded or when that bastard John Constantine gets it into his head to un-invince him, okay? And _I remember lightning._ ”

“Does it matter?” Victor asked, still unable to resolve visual contact or even tell how many people were in the room with him, or even what room he was in. “The station exploded. We need to get out and work on a plan of action once we’re back, you know, on Earth.”

He blinked, and oh, right. He could see, sort of. One eye, the one that was still more Victor Stone than Cyborg, worked at focusing in the dim green illumination. He turned his head so he could look at Billy.

He had no other way of making sure he was alright, and up until Superman had figured out Billy’s identity, however long ago, that had been 100% his job.

Even with Superman knowing and being way better for the job of looking after Billy Batson when he wasn’t Shazam, Victor hadn’t tried to shake the habit.

He _liked_ looking after Billy. Liked how het up he always got about being looked after, liked Sunday dinner with the Vasquezes after they got back from Mass (sometimes Victor joined them. There was something about Fawcett City that meant no one ever seemed to notice that he was… well. Cyborg. And maybe Victor wasn’t religious, and definitely he wasn’t Catholic, but it was like Billy said: a good way to clear your mind). Liked _Billy_.

“Hey,” Billy said. “How’s it going?”

“Oh, you know,” Victor said, smiling ruefully. “Mom took away my internet for the weekend and I think I’m having withdrawal symptoms.”

Billy grinned. “You should come hang out at my place: we’ve got an XBox.”

“So does Robin,” Batman interjected, and Victor tried to sit up in protest.

Billy pressed a hand against his chest, but it was the ton of dead weight the electronics his body had transformed into that actually kept him down. Turned out, without servos and shit, that was a _lot_ of dead weight.

“I’m gonna be really, really clear about one thing,” Billy said. “And I don’t need Shazam to say this either, this is all me: I’m not one of your Robins.”

“Bi--”

“ _No_ ,” Billy said emphatically, and if Victor could have he would have stood up and cheered. Even Superman had never managed to so thoroughly interrupt Bruce before, and Billy _hadn’t_ needed Shazam to do it. “I know what happened to Jason Todd. I know about the fight you had with Dick. I know about the new kid. I’m _not them_.”

“That’s not up for discussion,” Bruce snapped.

“Neither is this. You can kick me out of the League for joining under false pretenses or whatever, but I have a family, and I have Shazam. I don’t need _anything_ else.”

Victor wanted to hug him. “He has me, too,” he said. His voice sounded strange, rough and flat and disused.

All eyes focused on him.

“How are you?” Green Lantern asked, and the ambient lighting flickered.

“Don’t move,” Bruce ordered, which everyone but Bruce seemed to have figured out was the fastest way to make sure Hal _did_ move, and sure enough, next thing he knew, Lantern was standing over him, leaning heavily against the wall and scanning him with the ring.

“It looks like you’re still pretty much offline,” he said. “But, good news: your lungs are working again.”

He sounded giddy, and Victor looked at Bruce, whose face was an open wound.

Bad then, whatever had happened to Hal. Well, if he was injured, relying on him to get them back off the space station safely was out of the question.

“Can you Shazam?” Victor asked.

Billy shrugged helplessly. “I think he’s healing. It wasn’t a good one,” he added, tugging down the cuffs of his shirt in a nervous habit Victor was intimately familiar with.

“Can I see?” he asked, even though he didn’t want to. The Lichtenberg scars on Billy’s arms were viscerally horrifying, but he felt like he _needed_ to know.

Slowly, Billy pushed up his sleeves, revealing the bright red tracings of fresh scars. Hal whistled long and low, and Bruce turned and hit a wall.

“Careful,” Victor said. “That’s the only thing holding in the air.”

Wrong joke, wrong timing; he could see that as soon as he’d said it, and he recoiled slightly from the triple expressions of hopelessness on three of the bravest people he know.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. How bad is it, really?”

***

Bruce paced the confines of the little engineering lab they’d holed up in, even though he knew none of the rest of them could tolerate his pacing.

He would have given a lot to have someone more even-keeled with them: Clark was good at that, but he’d have swapped out Wonder Woman and Captain Atom for Hal and the _kid_ in a heartbeat.

Sadly, as with most things in life, he had what he had and not what he wished he had.

“I’m going to meditate,” Billy announced quietly. “You guys keep… brooding angrily or whatever, okay?”

Bruce turned, and abruptly Billy settled into full lotus, his hand still linked with Cyborg’s, and shut his eyes.

Hal forced a laugh and Bruce turned to him. “I think I might have a severe concussion,” he announced generally, “Because I’m pretty sure Shazam is a _child_ , and that doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

“He’s a teenager,” Victor said.

“Really,” Hal said. “How old is he then?”

“I’m seventeen,” Billy said, “And talking about me isn’t making this any easier.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic. He’s seventeen, Bruce, did you hear that?”

“Jason’s age,” Bruce replied, and that’s when he realized how much Billy’s words had stung, earlier, and he bit his lip.

Hal snorted and pushed himself off the bulkhead he’d been leaning against, weaving over to Bruce and clapping a hand on his shoulder.

Hal didn’t have a joke to crack the tension, and that was somehow worse. Still, Bruce covered Hal’s hand with his and _squeezed_.

“Someone’s going to need to look into doing repairs on me,” Cyborg said, and Bruce wanted to run screaming from the thought, but the fact of the matter was that he was the only person remotely qualified to even _try_ , so he let go of Hal’s hand and gently guided him back over to the chair he’d found for him earlier, then made his way over to what was probably their only real hope at getting off the Watchtower alive.

Well, Superman would be fine-- he could survive vacuum easily.

Everyone else-- he refused to look back at Hal again, because he didn’t want to hear his complaints about Bruce being a mother hen, and instead his gaze fell on Billy, who was _Jason’s_ age, breathing shallowly and carefully, eyes still beneath shut lids, _meditating_ while they spun through space on the death trap _he’d_ built.

The first time his fingers went to the latches on Cyborg’s chest panel, his hands were shaking, and he had to snatch them back, clench them into fists at his sides, and count to ten.

Cyborg glanced between him and Billy, and raised his eyebrow in a way that was probably meant to be understanding, but the fact was, Cyborg _couldn’t_ understand.

Bruce was having a hard time not holding that against him right that second, but the surge of resentment and anger pushed away the self-doubt so he could open the panel and peer inside.

He cracked one of his chemlights and used that for illumination, and gently he brushed wires and wafers aside so he could look at the deeper things, and he tried extremely hard to not think about how deep into Cyborg’s chest the electronics extended.

“It doesn’t look damaged,” Bruce said. “Not that I have any way of confirming that, but there’s no evidence of physical damage, and it smells fine.”

“I thought so,” Cyborg said. “So why am I still offline?”

Bruce shrugged helplessly. “There’s nothing here to repair,” he concluded, and carefully closed the panel before he retreated back to Hal’s side, checking his head again and wondering what Clark would do if he yelled at him about risking his life going after Batman for the fifth time.

“You’ll come up with a plan,” Hal assured him softly, so the others couldn’t hear.

Bruce grunted, not as ready to believe in that himself-- he’d already checked everything they had up here, and there wasn’t anything to plan _with_.

There wasn’t even any spare O2 left where they could get at it, which at least meant they were going to die a nice quick death by suffocation instead of slowly by starving.

Well, again, except Superman, who--

Oh. _Oh_. Superman could go down to Earth and get Hal’s lantern, and probably some O2 and food so that Hal could take time recover from the concussion he was fighting through, and then Hal could get the rest of them back down to Earth safely. Deliver Cyborg to STAR Labs, find out what kind of parents were letting Billy run amok as Shazam at all hours, and then figure out what to do about their partially destroyed secret space station.

He looked up to tell the others the plan, which seemed like the only possible plan, when Billy opened eyes lit unnaturally from within, grimaced, and said “SHAZAM!”

The bolt of lightning that accompanied the change had Bruce’s vision whited out for several seconds, but when he blinked away the after-image, it was to the sight of Cyborg powered up and gasping, and Shazam bent double, clutching a bloody gash in his side, face white with pain.

“Billy!” Bruce snapped, and he went to the ridiculously inadequate first aid locker he’d had put in this room.

“It’s Shazam, actually,” the man gasped. “Different-- it’s different.”

“Shazam’s like an avatar or something, he kind of… swaps with Billy. He isn’t _quite_ Billy,” Cyborg said, and he’d switched their positions; laying Shazam down on the table so he could apply pressure to the wound.

The sight of his cybernetic parts glowing and active sent a thrill of reassurance through Bruce that he couldn’t quite credit, and even as Cyborg pressed on the bloody wound and murmured reassurances, the lights started coming up in the room.

“Ugh, it’s like connecting through molasses,” Cyborg complained. “But I should have life support back on in a few minutes”.

“Good. We need to figure out the status of the hangar bay and any escape pods.”

“Let’s focus on oxygen first,” Clark reminded them gently.

“And cooling,” Hal muttered. “Functioning space station will get awfully hot if it’s on and there’s no coolant.”

He shuddered a little, and Bruce reached out to check his head again.

“‘S not like I’m cracking it against large chunks of space debris while _inside_ the death trap space station,” Hal muttered, but he didn’t actually try to stop Bruce from checking, so Bruce ran his fingers over the bruised skin anyway.

And maybe he let his hand linger in Hal’s hair a little longer than he normally would, but-- five minutes ago he’d thought they were all going to die up here.

Hal leaned into the touch, just slightly, and Bruce forced himself to breathe, to focus on the now where they weren’t dying and not the past where they had been.

Now was better. Now was easy.

***

_Three weeks later…_

Hal hadn’t meant to tag along.

Well, he had, because he _knew_ Bruce, and he knew that this was a terrible plan and Bruce was going to walk away from this little encounter he was staging a little worse off than he’d been yesterday, and he’d need whatever the hell he kept Hal around for, afterwards.

“This? This is a really shitty plan,” Hal said, leaning back in the passenger seat and stretching. “For the record.”

“If you’re allowed to implement plans I think are shitty--”

“Am I though?” Hal asked, smiling at nothing in particular.

“You’re a stubborn idiot who does whatever he wants, and damn the consequences.”

“Yeah,” Hal sighed happily. Then, to change the subject, said: “This place is _freaky_.”

“It’s Fawcett, not Gotham,” Bruce replied.

Hal snorted. “You forget, I grew up in freaky suburbia. This place is like, _Stepford_. I’m pretty sure those kids are playing baseball in the street over there.”

Bruce slowed a little, and he could _feel_ how intensely he was examining the children on the street playing baseball.

“Maybe it is a little… odd,” he acknowledged before accelerating back to the speed limit.

“He’s going to kill you,” Hal couldn’t resist adding. Bruce snorted, and then they were pulling into the driveway of a well-kept suburban home, and Bruce was unfolding himself from the driver’s seat and smoothing his dress slacks with a practiced air of playboy indifference.

“Let’s ring the bell shall we, darling?”

Hal grinned wider. “I can’t wait to watch a teenager kick your ass, that’s for sure.” He didn’t add: ‘it’s been too long’ because it was far too soon for him to be saying shit like that. He was pretty sure that for Bruce, it would _always_ be too soon. Maybe if Tim got too old and moved on, and Bruce found another teenager who actually wanted to kick his ass, maybe then it wouldn’t be too soon, but… Well.

The woman who answered the door was not at all what Hal had expected, but Bruce didn’t even blink. “Mrs. Vasquez? My name is Bruce Wayne, and I was in the area. I wanted to talk to you about the Wayne Foundation scholarship your son applied for.”

Hal rolled his eyes so hard he was pretty sure Bruce could feel it, and Mrs. Vasquez shook his hand, looking a little harried, and then said, “Call me Rosa, please. Come inside?”

They went inside. The Vasquezes must have had like forty-seven children, and Hal had a horrifying thought that maybe letting Bruce meet them had been not-so-hilarious after all for half a second before Billy recognized them.

“Oh no,” he said. Bruce smiled a charming smile, and Hal choked back an amused laugh. “No way in _hell_ are you coming in to _my_ house like this.”

“Billy!” a chorus of reproving voices sang out, and Billy jerked his shoulder in acknowledgement and then shook his head.

“No. I told you no, and I wasn’t kidding. I know what you’re selling, but I’m not buying it; any of it. I _have_ a family, and a life.”

“But do they know the real you?” Bruce asked, suddenly intense and _Bruce_ and not at all the charming billionaire who caused all the scandals.

“We do,” a little girl said firmly. “Billy’s a hero.”

Rosa smiled a soft, happy smile. “I thought you were here about a scholarship? Do you want to speak with Eugene alone?”

Bruce looked over at her, then back at the kids. “There’s no need,” he said, drawing a little back from Billy who was seventeen and defensive and angry and also, sometimes, Shazam who Hal had always thought was the sweetest guy on the entire planet. “It’s a really, really big scholarship.”

“Let him do this,” Hal said. He meant ‘You can’t stop him from doing this, but he wants it to be your idea,’ and he’d been working in the field with Shazam for three years, so he could see when Billy got that.

“You know what? Fine. But you don’t get to come here again. This was a one-off. I didn’t invite you, I’m not _going_ to invite you; this is _my_ family. You can focus on fucking up your own, got it?”

“You’re seventeen, Billy,” Bruce said slowly, like he was explaining something to a particularly stubborn person. Or maybe like he sounded when he was trying to talk Hal out of doing something stupid that Hal was always going to do anyway.

Billy spread his hands, and smiled slowly. “Sure, I’m seventeen. But it’s not just me, right?”

The posse of kids all started smiling a little at that, a smile Hal was quite familiar with, and he wanted to take a little step back. It had been three weeks they’d been dealing with Billy instead of Shazam, and he had thought he was starting to get used to the idea, but… the little girl was like, four or something. Really, _really_ young, at least.

Bruce didn’t say anything, but his shoulders were taut and he was standing like he was ready to take a hit, and Hal could only think… this kid would be the death of the entire League, if he could out-Batman Batman.

“Bruce,” Hal said, reaching for his hand. “Bruce, we should _go_.”

“No,” Billy said. “He wanted this. He’s staying for dinner.”

“Fine,” Bruce said.

Billy Batson smiled. “Great.” He turned abruptly and all the kids filed out.

Batman was so, _so_ going to regret this. Hal laced their fingers together and squeezed.


End file.
